


Glitter

by karkatmarx



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angels, Angst, Humanstuck, M/M, Sadstuck, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 19:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9918866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karkatmarx/pseuds/karkatmarx
Summary: Karkat falls for Dave, and doesn't get back up.





	

You step up to the gnarled oak in front of you. If you look up, the branches probably spiral and fork into a tall spire that arcs over the two houses next to each other in the small cul de sac that you live in. But you aren’t looking up yet. Not if you want to make it up to the third story attic of the ash grey house next to you. The dying grass feels rough under your feet, and the ground is hard from the cold. You step up onto the lowest knot of the tree, your dark hands thick and unsure as you place them on the familiar bark. Your brow is furrowed, and you put the letter you had crumpled in your fist between your teeth. It cuts into the corner of your lips, but you have more pressing things on your mind at the moment.

You know Dave’s up there, and that’s what matters. You hike yourself upwards, barely hooking your fingers onto one of the wider, lower branches. It makes you stretch, and you consider letting yourself fall to the ground already. It would be just about as fruitful as the complete idiocy you are planning right now. Just because everyone considers you king of romantic gestures doesn’t mean you had to pull this plan from your ass.

The thing is, you love love. You always have. It’s pervaded throughout your lifetime, regardless of how contrasting it is against your prickly personality. Dave would laugh whenever you mentioned it, but he would never stop you from playing some shitty romantic comedy on movie night. You’ve probably seen Failure to Launch more than anyone you’ve ever met combined. You have bad movies written into your very blood. You keep bodice rippers under the bed, the spines broken and pages folded. You’ve never been very organized, after all. You keep a bookshelf in your closet, where you keep your coding books, and behind that lays the rest of your collection, stolen from libraries or purchased at yard sales. Dave has read some of them before out loud, his voice quiet and measured between each laugh. He makes it a production, waving his hand and pressing his cold eggshell fingers across your caramel face to tease you even more. It makes your hair stand on end -- like electricity is running right under your skin. Dave’s mouth is a soft pink, skin peeling over where he has picked at it. You notice he has a mole under his chin when he lays upside down on your bed, the book open to a random page. You have studied the men on the front, their chests glistening before the crash of a wave. You assume, in this situation, that you’re the limpet hanging off of Dave’s arm. Dave laughs, his adam’s apple bobbing. You see his cherry eyes looking up at you, face soft and sagging from the weight of gravity pulling him towards the floor. You love love. You’d draw on your window with an expo marker, a heart with his initials in it, before erasing it. You don’t sleep for a long time those nights.

You imagine Dave laughing at you, spinning off some weird tripe about how the envelope is pink. Sighing through your teeth, you pull yourself up the branch and stick your other foot in the main crook of the tree. You waver again, the bark of the branch you have your hand around biting in the mid-autumn evening.

You think about Dave saying yes to your stupid proposal. The letter already has spit on it, and he would have to overlook the teeth holes you are probably biting into the cardstock. You remember when he would hold your hand in the 3rd grade, his cheeks fat and extra red. He would always say he would marry you back then. His cheeks never flush as much as they used to -- either Dave’s skin grew thicker, or he grew into himself. He was almost always the most ethereal of porcelain whites, every part of him eaten up by albinism. Even his eyelashes were pale, cutting into the red of his eyes and the grey of his pupil with stunning grace.

Taking another reach to the sky, you grab onto another smaller branch and heft yourself upwards. You can already feel the weariness of your limbs, and you don’t dare look down. You know that’s where demons lie. You press forward, pulling your other foot up to join the one in the crook of the tree. You have to follow the path closer to Dave’s house, and you look up the winding capillaries of the tree extending into the lavender sky. Clouds flow in from the east, but it doesn’t deter you. The only verb that can describe you as you continue is scrambling, as you barely manage to hook your feet into the irregularities of the tree.

You think about Dave smiling at you. You think about him saying no, his eyes pitying and mouth pulled tight in a grimace as he shakes his head. Or if he laughs and takes it as a joke, even if you went out of your way to use glitter glue and a huge heart cut from construction paper. It made you think of Valentine’s Day two years ago, when you sat in his bedroom and watched Love Actually three times. He had a container of red glitter that he spilled all over you. You shouted and protested, grabbing handfuls of it to rub in his hair and all over his face. He laughed and laughed, and the glitter on his face reflected in the incandescent light. He had glitter in his fingernails and in his hairline for days. Something deep and dark in your heart felt warmed by that, even if it was cheap dollar store glitter. You had him, if only for a moment.

By now you are balancing yourself on a longer tree branch that reaches over to Dave’s window. It’s thinner, but seems stable. It bends slightly under your weight as you cling to the branch. In your position, you have to look down. The ground looks further away than it should, like somehow the tree has grew in all the time it took you to climb the stupid thing. You feel your breath picking up, the corners of your mouth wetting and staining the letter even more. You look forward in a panic, tightening your hold on the tree branch. Your vision pinholes, and your hands grow clammy. You have to do this. You have to. Dave’s window is still obscured by the reflection of the setting sun behind you, the last of it’s rays just kissing the horizon as you sit astride the branch and resort to scooting forward on it. It gets you most of the way there, and you can finally look into the window.

Dave’s room has never been very clean. No matter how many zip ties or cord organizers you surreptitiously leave in his room when you think Dave isn’t looking, the tangled mess on the ground continues to grow. You somehow always end up tripping, regardless of how careful you are. It seems like every other day his room is organized just slightly differently, which is a mystery in and of itself. His bed is pushed up against the wall opposite the window you are peering through, a floating shelf of fossils higher up on the wall. Since you have started gifting them to him last summer, the shelf is overflowing with ambers and small bones. A jar with a dead bird, suspended in formaldehyde, glows weirdly in the sun. While you could accept the fossils and ambers, you were never as much into dead things as he was. A milk crate of records prop the door open only slightly, and you can hear music playing from the headphones plugged into the turn tables that are pushed against the wall under the window. It’s soft and melodic, unlike most of the formless bass-heavy songs he listens to. You move in closer, and the tree branch you are holding onto creaks ominously.  
As you step on the ledge of the window frame, as silent as can be, things seem to come into focus a bit more. You see Dave, his figure long and facedown on the bed. His feet are off the edge, and his fingers peek only slightly from the shroud of a huge red sweatshirt. However, this isn’t what really catches your attention. As the sun dips even further beneath the horizon, Dave is illuminated in scarlet.

A pair of huge, delicately arched bird’s wings grow from his back and span comfortably across the room, one spread over the cluttered floor and one curving high against the wall just beneath the floating shelf. The weird dead bird seems to be mocking you now. It’s eerily beautiful, even if Dave has one hand in a bag of Doritos. The wings move as he breathes, shifting as the wind picks up and billows the curtains into the room and over the delicate machinery of the turntable. Though you’ve always compared him to an angel when you were feeling particularly sappy, you never could have imagined this turn of events. It makes your heart stop, like you have intruded upon something that you know you shouldn’t have.

You finally catch the breath you lost, your hands sweaty and slippery. You would drop the letter if you didn’t catch yourself from letting your jaw drop. The wind shakes the tree again, and you shift to hold on, but fail. You twist, the tree bending like wet paper under your weight as you try to hold onto your position without squealing in fear. But you seem to have used up all of your luck for the day. The branch breaks underneath you with a drawn out, echoing snap. Your foot slides off the edge of the window banister. You fall like a sack of bricks, body feeling weightless for only a moment before you slam into the hard, cold grass of Dave’s side yard.

* * *

 

You don’t think much of the muted thump outside until every cell of your body lights up in alarm. You look towards the window, spotting the blue jay that had made a nest in the tree beside your home. It flies away with a small desperate cry, like it is struggling to fly correctly. It dips below the frame of the window before disappearing upwards. The white hairs on your arms raise and it feels like every breath you take in makes lightning sparkle between the roof of your mouth and your tongue. You scramble up, wiping your hand on your sweatpants and running forward to the window. You have to step up on the edge of your turntables to look out the window, but what you see immediately makes your heart drop down to your stomach. Turntables be damned, you step across the top of them, diving out of the window and snapping your wings open to land by Karkat’s prone body. His eyes are open and glassy, his body limp and unmoving. Though you don’t need to breathe much, your lungs constrict and you almost fall trying to kneel next to him. The forecast from earlier finally decides to rear its head as it begins to drizzle. You create a canopy above Karkat’s torso with your wings, the whiteness of them casting him in a deathly shadow. His dark skin looks sunken and ashy. You think he focuses his eyes on you, panic evident in the slight tightness of his face and brows.

You can feel the connection threading the two of you together wavering, like the drop of a rock in a still pond. The only other time you have felt that kind of disturbance is when the both of you had gone to the lake after his 13th birthday. Somehow you had convinced him to step out of his comfort zone and sneak out in the night. The summer was bright and full of stars -- the night had never felt as dark as it should during those long summer days that you spent together. He wore a shirt when he went swimming, but Karkat was still wary and self conscious, standing with his arms around his middle and curling his toes into the rolled pebbles on the bank of the lake. You were already sunk chest deep into the water, the cold biting but bearable in the humid air.

“Come on!” You call, your voice still high and childlike. You smile, but you keep your eyes trained on Karkat.

“Why did I agree to this again? Oh yeah, because I’m a huge idiot, and I do anything that Dave Strider says.” He snaps back, but he takes a few more steps forward. The water laps at his ankles, and his silhouette is illuminated by the dark indigo of the sky and the moon on the curves of his round face.

What you didn’t know then, that you reflect on now, is that he did have a reason to be hesitant. He had never learned to swim, but was too proud to confess. After pulling him deeper into the center of the inky lake, you watched him sink as if someone had tied a bag of rocks to his ankle. You could barely remember the thousands of lives you had lived before that moment, your body shocked and electrified like heat lightning in Texas. You had paused long enough for the water to return to being smooth and glassy, as if Karkat did not lie beneath, struggling and desperate for life. The moon now reflected on the water like a black mirror, and you felt your connection shudder and shake like a faraway earthquake.

Stuttering back to life, you dive under the water, and manage to yank him back up on the shore. He coughs and splutters, the rocks crushing under his hands and knees as he hacks water onto the ground. You can’t tell if the water on his face is from the lake or from him until you touch his face with your hand, the warmth of his tears flowing through your fingers as you pull his face up to look at you. You both are along the bank, your legs still touched by the water as the waves crest. One of his hands is on your calf, his warm, thick fingers almost encircling the delicate curve of it. His face is pinched and sad, but he doesn’t look angry at you, only terrified for himself. The moonlight makes him look unearthly, his eyelashes long and clumped together. In that moment, you feel just as young as he is, wet and shivering on the shore of the yawning mouth of death. You can’t quite catch your breath, like the snap back of your connection has robbed you of your essence better than any meeting with death ever has.  
That feeling is echoed now, your vision wavering as you stare down at Karkat’s limp body. You can barely feel the tips of your fingers as you press your hands to his cheeks as you did that day on the lake. His face already is growing cold, and his blood pools and sinks into the earth. You wish you could collect it all somehow, as if that could save him, but the Earth never bent to your will as much as the wind did.

“Karkat,” you say quietly, shifting your position closer to his face. “You can’t die like this.”

You laugh, voice high and hysterical. His eyes shift back and forth between yours, mouth opening on a shivery breath. You move to cup his head more, hot blood slicking on your fingers as you press your hand on the top of his head and push the hair out of his face. Karkat looks frightened and small. You slide your hand ever so slowly to the back of his head, and you can feel the edge of the rock he had fallen onto, its edge jagged against the veins on the back of your palm. The life leaks out of him from that point like a dam has been broken, like it was just waiting for the right moment to flood.

“Why did you do this?” you croak.

By now, tears are falling down your face as well, onto his nose and onto the backs of your hands. Your throat is tight, every word that you manage to squeak past your throat like the wrong note on an untuned violin. His eyes dart to the side, away from you, and you cast your eyes past him. There’s a pink letter on the ground, a few of the raindrops having distorted the front of it. You look back at him, and you’ve known him for long enough to realize that if he could be crying, he would be. You reach for it, blood staining the outside as you grab onto the letter and fumble at it with shaking hands. You have to rip it along the side, pulling out a folded piece of paper. Glitter spills out all over Karkat’s chest. It’s bright red, in the shapes of stars and hearts. You open the letter, the paper crumpled and slightly wet as you look over it.

“Prom?” You say quietly, your vision blurring as your face heats and a fresh wave of emotion rolls through you. Your tears are fat and full, dripping on the page. You can barely read Karkat’s dark, scribbly handwriting, but you’re past the details now.

“You must have been really dying to go, huh?” You laugh again, but it falls flat. “I guess I made you fall for me, alright.”

You sigh, but it’s high and tight in your chest. Your breath is fluttering like the arch of a hummingbird’s wing as you feel the earthquake rumbling, closer, and closer, and closer.

“I can - I can fix this, Karkat. I can-” Your voice breaks over a sob, and you drop the letter to cup his face again.

There’s blood in your nailbeds. It makes you think of a moment a few years ago, on that same Valentine’s day. You both sat together on your bed, watching movies and making the most ridiculous valentines for each other. You think maybe your heart grew a little that day, watching him laugh and get hot chocolate on his upper lip. Karkat just seemed so taken with everything, from the movies to the lumpy hearts you cut out for him. He had spilled glitter all over his cheeks and hands, leaving reflective freckles that took your breath away. You can’t remember your chest feeling so light from wrestling over arts and crafts.

“Just trust me, baby. Just trust me. I know what to do. I was born to do this, see? I was made -- I was made just for you.” You press your forehead to his, and you pull at that connection of yours. It resists, but you reach further, pulling and pulling and pulling.

It hurts you, the most awful of pains that rests deep between your shoulder blades. It feels like your wings are being pulled from your body -- from that deeply magical part of you, like your soul is being cleaved in half. You hold onto him, his soul, like you held onto him that day in the lake. You can see the surface above you, and all you have to do is pull him to the shore again. You’re sinking in the worst way, like you and him are trading places. You’re the one falling into the black lake now, and the only thing you can see is Karkat’s hand clasped around yours, and the prick of the full moon in the sky above you. If you want him to swim, you must sink. If you want him to live, you must die. You’ve never missed the sky more than this moment, as the pressure of the water takes your last breath.  
But even when you die, you don’t regret a thing.

* * *

 

When you wake up again, you jolt upright in your bed. It’s dark outside, all but one of the blinds drawn in your room. You look down at your hands, feeling strangely bereft. They are as they have always been, thick and unwieldy. You always wish you had a bit more grace. You look around your room, disoriented as if you’ve been sleeping for hours. You have glitter on your chest, and your head hurts way too much for someone who has been sleeping for as long as you think you have been. You carefully brush off the glitter into your hand. You can barely see it in the dark, but a few pieces catch the light and highlight the shapes of the stars and hearts. Weird. You look towards the open window. The sky is dark, and you can’t see the moon from your place on the bed looking out the window across the room. Everything is cast in shadow, the colors around the room muted and almost completely reduced to their shapes. You see something on your desk, and you swing your legs over the edge of the bed and pad over to it to pick it up. Your first impulse is to immediately put it back down when you see it. It’s a dead bird in a jar, suspended in sickly yellow formaldehyde. You don’t remember ever seeing this thing in your life, and it’s definitely not yours. Somehow, through the color of the preservatives, the blue of the feathers shines through. It’s ethereal and strangely reflective, as if it was more alive than dead when it was suspended in this moment in time. There’s a suit hanging from your closet door, the one your father gifted to you for prom in a few weeks. You still don’t know who you should ask, but you’re enticed by the idea of a really dramatic prom proposal. You smile just thinking about it.

But as you look at this strange bird on your desk, you have a feeling you’ve forgotten something very, very important.


End file.
